Recently, information exchange is becoming more active and industries related to e-commerce such as online banking are expanding pursuant to development of the Internet. Accordingly, authentication of users is required to be more precisely performed. In general, a PIN (personal identification number) or a password has been used to authenticate a user. However, there is a possibility that the PIN or password can be exposed or forgotten, and thus, a security problem is increasingly becoming important issue. In order to solve this problem, biometric recognition technology has been introduced.
However, since biometric information may be impossible to change or limited to change, it causes significant problem when the biometric information stored for authentication of a user is illegally used by other person. Therefore, studies for protecting the biometric information such as a fingerprint of a user are actively being conducted using a technique such as a code, watermarking and steganography.
A fingerprint recognition system costs effectively on installation and has a high reliability for security. Especially, the fingerprint recognition system can be configured in a compact size, so that it can be movable and arranged at any space.
As people's interest in protecting their own privacy increases, the fingerprint recognition technology is developing as the most outstanding technology in an image recognition technology field. Such a fingerprint recognition technology is used not only for a simple access control system but also for a remote application system such as Internet banking, electronic government, etc.
A fuzzy vault system has been proposed to safely protect a fingerprint feature point, but attack methods thereto such as correlation attack has also been discovered, so that the fuzzy vault system has been exposed to a danger in security. Also, when the fingerprint feature point transmitted through a network is exposed, the fingerprint recognition system is also exposed to an attacker.
Therefore, the fingerprint recognition system using the fuzzy vault has a problem of weak security.